Flowers, Fruit, Reptiles and Insects on the Edge of a Wood

Rachel Ruysch signed this one in the upper left in 1716, and she painted it looking down rather than up. There is no vase and no table. It is the floor of a wood, with grapes and peaches spilled across it, a bird's nest, a kingfisher, insects, and a snake moving through the stems. Pictures like this have a name of their own, sottobosco, the undergrowth piece. She came to it with unusual preparation. Her father, Frederik Ruysch, was professor of anatomy and botany in Amsterdam and kept one of the most visited specimen collections in Europe, and she grew up drawing from it. The canvas only reached Florence long after her death, bought for the gallery in February 1823, and in 1940 it left again, spending the war stored in a Tuscan villa.